“Thanks to the folks at Chipworks, we now know how large the A9X chip inside of Apple’s iPad Pro is,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “Armed with this knowledge, I’d like to offer up an estimate of how much it costs to build that particular chip.”
“There are three major variables that go into determining the manufacturing cost of a chip: Finished wafer cost; chip die size; [and] manufacturing yields,” Eassa writes. “The impact of silicon wafer cost should be obvious. The chip die size impacts both the total number of chips that can be physically built on a given wafer as well as the manufacturing yields of the chip (there is more that can ‘go wrong’ on a larger chip than on a smaller chip).”
Eassa writes, “I arrive at an estimate of $37.30 to manufacture the A9X.”
See how Ashraf got to $37.30 in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Seems like it’s in the realm of possibility. If so, the A9X is markedly more expensive than the A9, which Eassa estimates costs Apple between $22-$24 per chip (which is in line with an IHS iSuppli estimate).